In many cases, when displaying Facebook profile pictures, the image needs to fit into a specifically allotted space within the user interface. Resizing and scaling the image can be a cumbersome process, often resulting in suboptimal image quality.

This week, we released updates to our application-programming interfaces to allow you to retrieve users’ profile pictures in varying sizes. Alternate profile picture sizes can be queried via the graph API and FQL.

To retrieve a profile picture in an alternate size via the graph API, add the optional width and height fields as URL parameters:

This will return a HTTP 302 redirect to a profile picture with a minimum size of 121×100 while trying to preserve the aspect ratio. You can add the URL parameter redirect=false to retrieve just the URL to the picture. If width=height, then a square picture will always be returned.